Curve Bent

April 13th, 2020, 1:50pm by Sam Wang

There it is. Time to double the number of deaths, as of today: US 7.2 days, NJ 6.5 days, NY 7.3 days.

The number of deaths approximately reflects new infections as of about 2-3 weeks ago. Therefore the number of new infections was doubling every 7 days. Since infection itself lasts about 2 weeks, i.e. an average of 1 week, this means that the newly infected were approximately equal to the newly recovered. That suggests the number of infected peaked – and is therefore should be on the decline.

Note that deaths is a good way to track the course of covid-19. Even if underreported, the degree of underreporting is less likely to change than the number of confirmed cases.

2 Comments so far ↓

Yes, I saw that. We tracked down the cause. The Utah records had a day when the cumulative number of deaths decreased, which is of course impossible. We added a safeguard to the code to deal with such record-keeping errors. Thank you for flagging this.